A Cup of Leadership CaffeineMost leaders struggle to understand whether they are helping or hindering the cause.  Except of course for those leaders/narcissists who believe that their every utterance is sheer genius wrapped in pure motivational gold.

The feedback from your manager, while important, tends to be based on either numbers or fairly casual observation.  And feedback from your team members is welcomed, but you never really know for sure whether it’s the unvarnished type.

The “Am I Helping?” issue is particularly important when a troubled team or organization gains a fresh leader. I’ve lived this situation a number of times and I’ve spoken with leaders familiar with navigating the throes of turnarounds and significant change initiatives about how they measure their own effectiveness.  Most agree that while the indicators of progress and personal leadership effectiveness aren’t posted on the wall every day, the signs are present in the workplace for everyone to read.

Whether overtly or through their interpersonal and working dynamics, it turns out that your team members make it pretty clear whether you are helping, hindering or just taking up space, time and valuable oxygen. However, it’s up to you as the leader to learn to read these important but often subtle signs and to adjust accordingly.

4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working:

1. Conversation Quality Improves: most troubled teams or organizations struggle to create high-quality conversations that focus on facts, tough issues and ideas and options.  Often, the dialogue reflects denial or it unduly preoccupies on the negatives in the situation. The effective leader helps conversations move in the right direction by creating an environment of transparency and candor.  Easy words, but a difficult task that takes time and a nearly constant care and feeding by the leader.

2. Idea Flow Increases: an important by-product of improved conversation quality is the increased flow of ideas for fixing today’s problems and forging the future.  Troubled teams led by lousy leaders are conditioned to focus on what’s right in front of them and to ignore the bigger picture.  Alternatively, effective leaders recognize that the one and only way to create the future is to leverage the collective grey-matter of the team.  These leaders look for the flow ideas to start as a trickle and they know that things are working when the trickle turns into a torrent of innovation and value-creation.

3. Collaboration Returns: troubled teams struggle to work together and often fail to translate squabbling into anything resembling constructive output. Groups on the mend tend to rediscover the fun and power of working together, and what was just recently a “No Collaboration Zone” begins to look and act like an environment that recognizes that people are interdependent upon one another.

4. Pride Returns and Quality Breaks Out All Over: the shift from an unhealthy environment where people do what they are told to a situation where personal pride drives individual and group accountability for quality is a powerful sign that a leader’s approach is fostering the right results.  Effective execution becomes important to the group and the pursuit of high-performance moves from lofty words to tangible goals. This tends to be a longer-range lagging indicator than several of the others and as it kicks in, the leader must recognize that his/her job is to increasingly emphasize knocking down obstacles and supporting the emergence of new leaders in the workplace.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Effective leaders understand that the measures described above are important outcomes of a great deal of hard work and not just accidents.  Effective leaders gauge their own progress by the visibility and trends of these measures more than by the traditional measures of performance or the often slightly (or majorly) biased input of managers and team members.  Get these right and top and bottom-line improvements flow.

While there are no gauges to precisely indicate the barometric pressure changes created by your approach to leading, awareness of and sensitivity to these measures is an important starting point.

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